When the late, great website The Dissolve ended operations, it’s commenting community had The Solute to call home, but the staff and writers of The Dissolve have been scattered to the winds of the Internet. With Dissolve On, we collect some of the essential film writing being done by these essential film writers. Because there’s always a Dissolver writing something notable about the movies (and occasionally other stuff) somewhere on the Internet.
These folks are talented and prolific, so please share the pieces we missed in the comments!
Tasha Robinson on “The Theme That Ties All of Guillermo del Toro’s Movie Together” for i09:
“Early in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, protagonist Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) eagerly gives a story she’s written to a publisher. But he sends her away, with the condescending instruction that ladies should really be writing romance stories, not ghost stories. She balks at the critique—not just because he’s a sexist ass, but because he’s misinterpreted her work. It isn’t a ghost story, she says, it’s a story with a ghost in it. “The ghost is a metaphor for the past,” she grumbles under her breath, knowing he isn’t really listening.
It’s the most self-aware moment in a largely self-aware movie. Del Toro has said Crimson Peak was inspired by Hammer horror films and gothic romances, with visual touches from Italian giallo films and Victorian paintings. Like Quentin Tarantino, del Toro is a synthesist with a passionate, wide-ranging devotion to culture, and a tendency to wear his influences openly. Those influences have never been more nakedly evident than in Crimson Peak, a lush, visually overripe love letter to the stylized cinema, literature, and art del Toro has loved in the past.
But the ghost-as-metaphor is del Toro’s own unique, heavily underlined author’s signature. With that line, he and co-writer Matthew Robbins spell out Crimson Peak’s central theme. And the burdensome past isn’t specific to this one movie. It runs through all of del Toro’s writer-director projects: the idea that people are haunted by their histories, and have to exorcise their memories to live complete lives.”
Tasha Robinson on Raul Garcia’s Extraordinary Tales for AV Club:
“You never know what you’re getting in an animation anthology—they tend to be grab bags of visually and even thematically unrelated material, varying widely in quality. Extraordinary Tales initially seems like it should be an exception to the rule: It’s a themed anthology of five Edgar Allan Poe short-story adaptations, all helmed by the same man. But Spanish-born director Raul Garcia seems to have gone out of his way to preserve the diverse anthology feel. Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.”
Keith Phipps on the past, present and future of midnight movies for The Verge:
“Which brings us back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and back to Hobart, Indiana. While other key films from the golden age of midnight movies still get brought out for the occasional showing, most are solely home-video fixtures. Rocky Horror remains a theatrical draw even after appearing on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, being broadcast on cable networks from VH1 to Logo, and Glee. If a proposed TV remake ever happens, it will almost certainly survive that, too. Why? The harder I’ve looked for a simple answer, the more that answer has eluded me. Alexander Degman, a member of the Help Me Mommy cast, even confessed to me he didn’t like the movie. “I like everything else.” Degman says of the film itself, “Whether it’s good or bad or indifferent, it’s people putting dedication into something. It’s people having a passion for something and just getting people to do something else other than sitting in front of the computer playing video games all night long.”
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is, in some ways, the safest form of rebellion, in Hobart or elsewhere. “We have a big audience of teenagers,” cast member Sarah Denton (who shares a last name with the hometown of Rocky Horror’s heroes) tells me, “and I like to think that we’re more of a safe place than anything. Because it’s a Saturday night, it’s a bunch of teenagers; they could be going to parties, out drinking, out doing drugs, but we’re not doing that here.” Instead, they’re watching and interacting with a movie, one formed from glam rock, bondage gear, and the cheap, lasting stuff of B-movie fantasies and dirty rock and roll. It’s a movie that takes a buttoned-up couple from Denton, Ohio and drops them into a fantastic, dangerous, arousing world they didn’t even know was within their reach. And if two kids from Denton can find it, then maybe anyone can.”
Keith Phipps on new home video releases for Uproxx:
“Pick of the Week: Mulholland Dr. (Criterion): …What in the movie is real? What is illusion?
But really, the film answers any questions in one scene. Past the midway point, Mulholland Dr.’s two protagonists — the fresh-faced Betty (Naomi Watts), a new arrival in L.A. after winning a jitterbug contest in Canada, and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), an amnesiac with the looks of a femme fatale, but the helplessness of a child — visit the mysterious Club Silencio. They’re immediately told by the club’s MC that everything they’re about to experience is an illusion, which he then demonstrates by showing that the trumpet player who’s joined him on stage isn’t playing the trumpet at all, just accompanying a recording. He’s immediately followed by a singer who launches into an a cappella, Spanish-language rendition of the Roy Orbison hit. As the emotion of the performance rises, Rita and Betty begin crying. It’s a moving performance that seems to speak directly to their own recent experiences — the peril they’ve faced while searching for the mystery behind Rita’s condition, the rawness of their own emotions after making love for the first time. It’s hard not to cry along with them, even after the singer collapses and the music goes on. It was all an illusion after all.
But what does that matter? The moment’s an illusion that itself seems to be part of an illusion once the preceding action is revealed to be, it would seem, part of a dream or hallucination conjured by Betty’s alter ego. At any rate, it’s an illusion within a larger illusion, that of the movie itself — which is itself an illusion made up of the stuff of earlier movies, Lynch’s childhood memories, and a Hollywood system in the business of creating illusions. In Mulholland Dr., more than in most movies, the rabbit hole has no bottom.”
Genevieve Koski on how Jem & The Holograms isn’t as good as Josie & The Pussycats for Vox:
“Now, granted, Josie wasn’t exactly a critical darling when it premiered — reviews could charitably be called “mixed” — and it was a certified box office bomb. But the cheeky adaptation of the musty Archie Comics characters-cum-1970s-cartoon has accrued a significant cult following in the years since it slunk out of theaters and on to home video.
Despite being perhaps the most 2001 movie imaginable — its pop music world is one ofTotal Request Live, physical media, and brick-and-mortar record stores — Josie still plays well today as both a tweaked musical comedy and a dark satire of the music industry. While it’s impossible to definitively predict the strange alchemy that creates a cult film, it’s a safe bet that Jem will not enjoy the same sort of appreciation down the road.
It didn’t have to be this way…”
Genevieve Koski (and Caroline Framke) on 28 Halloween entertainments “for wimps and scaredy-cats” for Vox:
“Fans knew Community could be something special with “Introduction to Statistics,” the series’ first Halloween episode. This was the moment the show stopped trying to be a more straightforward sitcom and let its quick-witted characters loose, to hilariously unhinged effect. (Bonus trivia: “Introduction to Statistics” was also directed by Fast & Furious’s Justin Lin.) Once Community found its footing, it got even more ambitious. “Epidemiology” is a pitch-perfect zombie episode, both a little creepy and a lot funny. “Horror Fiction in Seven Steps” reveals all the characters’ fears in the form of ghost stories, which immediately go off the rails. The show’s incredibly specific, speedy voice is perfectly suited to the more bizarre turns Halloween episodes can take. If you need to placate some horror fans who were hoping to get pedantic,Community would be a winning distraction. [Available on Hulu]”
Nathan Rabin on the Tales From The Crypt movies Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood for Flavorwire:
“In its various iterations, Tales From The Crypt’s gothic combination of sex, violence, monsters, and gallows humor has proven irresistible to multiple generations of juvenile delinquents. The lusty gore and gory lust of the EC Comics series helped inspire the Comics Code, created precisely to keep comic books as lurid and nasty as Tales From the Crypt out of the hands of impressionable young people; it didn’t work, then or in the decades that followed. The bloody and profane version of Tales From the Crypt that aired on HBO in the late ‘80s and ‘90s was explicitly targeted at mature audiences, which of course only made it more alluring to immature teenagers like me. And when the show was adapted for the big screen in the mid-1990s, it went without saying that the films — the first two of which have just been released on deluxe Blu-Ray editions by the nostalgia specialists over at Scream/Shout Factory — would be rated R, yet pitched unmistakably to the adolescents who worshipped the show (and particularly its wisecracking puppet antihero and host, The Crypt-Keeper).”
Nathan Rabin on Rusty Cundieff’s Tales From The Hood for AV Club:
“…Jordan Peele of Key & Peele fame is writing and directing a straight horror film called Get Out, which is explicitly about “the fears of being a black man today” and “takes on the task of exploring race in America,” something he claims has not been done in a horror movie since Night Of The Living Dead.
The idea of a Peele-created horror movie that delves boldly and explicitly into the murky and turbulent waters of our nation’s racial history is incredibly exciting. YetGet Out is most assuredly not the first horror film to tackle race in America since Night Of The Living Dead. As a comedy veteran and a horror buff, it’s likely that Peele has seen, but apparently forgotten about, the 1995 horror anthology Tales From The Hood, a Spike Lee-executive produced treatise on the plight of the black man in America that explores race in America to an exhaustive and exhausting degree. Like Peele, the film’s director, co-writer, and co-star, Rusty Cundieff, came from a comedy background, having recently triumphed with the cult hip-hop spoof Fear Of A Black Hat. (He went on to direct episodes of Chappelle’s Show and Human Giant, among other television work).
How didactic is Tales From The Hood? It’s not just unusually polemical and obsessed with race and politics for a horror movie. It’s unusually polemical and obsessed with race and politics even for a Spike Lee production.”
Nathan Rabin on Julianne Moore in Tales From The Darkside: The Movie for Decider:
“Moore was never a girl onscreen, always a woman, even in her 1990 movie debut Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, which paired her with another actor who would go on to make a profound impact in the decades ahead: Steve Buscemi.
Adapted from George Romero’s cult horror anthology, which in turn was inspired by the success of Romero’s own Creepshow, which in turn was inspired by the E.C Horror Comics that would inspire the Tales From The Crypt movies and television shows (It all comes back to the Crypt-Keeper, man! He is the alpha and undead omega), Tales From The Darkside: The Movie offers three tales of what could very generously be deemed terror united by the following framing device: A little boy reads stories from a book entitled Tales From The Darkside to a witch (played by Deborah Harry!) in a desperate attempt to postpone being eaten.
For a modestly budgeted horror anthology TV spinoff, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie has a surprisingly impressive pedigree. In the first segment, Michael McDowell, a novelist and screenwriter who was a favorite of Stephen King’s and co-wrote the script for Beetlejuice, adapts “Lot No. 249” a tale of mummified spookery in a snobby college town from Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle.”
Craig J. Clark on films with werewolves in theaters right now for Werewolf News:
“For the first time in recent memory, werewolf aficionados have two films featuring our favorite furry monsters to choose from in theaters this Halloween. True, they’re both more family-friendly than some might like, but PG werewolves are better than no werewolves.
First up, there’s Hotel Transylvania 2, the sequel to the hit animated film from 2012. I haven’t seen either, but Steve Buscemi does return to voice Wayne, the harried family wolf who has his paws full keeping his rambunctious pups in line. And since Hotel Transylvania 2 has continued to pack ’em in a month after its release, there’s every reason to believe we’ll be getting a Hotel Transylvania 3 in short order.
Less assured of a follow-up is Goosebumps, which brings to life all of the creepy crawlies cooked up by R.L. Stine in his book series of the same name. I had aged out of the target audience long before Stine’s books first came out in the early ’90s, so I’ve never read any of them, nor have I seen the television shows, specials, and videos they spawned. (Nope, not even The Werewolf of Fever Swamp.) That didn’t prevent me from enjoying the film, though, especially since said werewolf gets a fair bit of play. True, he’s a purely CGI creation (as are most of the monsters in the film), but he has a good design going for him and he’s party to some of the film’s most suspenseful sequences.”
Charles Bramesco on the 23 Weirdest Ways to Die in Horror Movies for Vulture:
“Drained by Were-Moth, The Blood Beast Terror (1967)
In the annals of British horror, Hammer Films enjoys the loftiest stature as the body responsible for the baroque-Gothic adaptations of Dracula, The Mummy, and The Curse of Frankenstein. But Tigon Productions turned out quite a few underrated gold nuggets along these lines of their own, stylish but cheap productions with titles like The Body Stealers, The Haunted House of Horror, and the delectably hokey creature feature The Blood Beast Terror. A lovely young woman moonlights as a were-moth and suspends unwitting men upside down, draining their blood and drinking it for herself. The larger pantheon of were-animals cowers before the terrible might of the were-moth, which ranks just below the werewolf and well above the were-camel.”
Charles Bramesco on the existential scares of Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku for Oscilloscope Laboratories’ Musings Blog:
“Nakagawa’s got a knack for conjuring mature-minded scares. Even when he indulges his every dark creative whim in the phantasmagorical hell he creates to torment wayward theology student Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), he tends to root the visible monstrosities onscreen in a decidedly real concern. Though Nakagawa employs surreal means of expressing them, his nightmare scenarios often revolve around covertly commonplace fears that would’ve been intimately known to his viewers. While in hell, Shiro’s taunted and tortured by the specters of his wife-to-be and their unborn child, the latter of whom leads Shiro on a walking tour of the many realms of hell as he attempts to rescue her. In evoking the images of the dead spouse and child, Nakagawa goes right for the emotional jugular. These images may not be unfamiliar to the folks in the audience, for whom such a situation presents a fate too terrible to envision. To parents, the fearsome element resides not in the ghostly apparitions but the loss that their presence literalizes. The psychedelic atrocities that Shiro witnesses in hell stem from eminently reasonable fears for a right-minded adult to have, which must surely be the worst fears of all.
Nakagawa’s most unsettling suggestion, however, may be that the workings of the universe are an arbitrary scramble of chaos. He takes a darkly existential approach to justice, cosmic or poetic or otherwise. As the film begins, we find Shiro in rigorous pursuit of academic success, sitting in rapt attention during a lecture from his theology professor. He’s a good boy, on the fast track to marry his professor’s daughter and advance into a life of success and comfort. He’s got a bright future laid out for him, and it seems like he deserves it, too. Nakagawa shows him to be a progressive and open-minded student of life, devoting equal time to East Asian religions as well as the Judeo-Christian tradition in his studies. Most importantly, Shiro’s especially fond of the notion of everything happening for a reason, that the universe operates under a grand schematic towards some larger good.”
Scott Tobias on John M. Chu’s Jem and The Holograms for NPR Movies:
“Something’s happening on the Internet,” yelps Kimber to her shy older sister Jerrica Benton, the instant pop sensation known as “Jem,” in the live-action version of Christy Marx’s mid-’80s cartoon staple Jem and the Holograms. Kimber is delighting over an acoustic video gone viral, but the line aptly describes the modus operandi of the filmmakers, who are desperate to tap into the preteen zeitgeist but haven’t got a clue how to do it. From what they can gather, the Internet is a series of tubes, connected by hashtag-dealing vloggers who will surely love the movie if they feel validated by it. The film is a cynical marketing plan set to music, as if director John M. Chu and his (all-male) producers and writer came away from Josie and the Pussycats thinking Parker Posey’s music-biz CEO was the hero.
That’s not all Jem takes from Josie. Ryan Landels’ script lifts the premise almost beat for beat — teen musician becomes overnight sensation, signs a Faustian deal with a slick-talking label executive (Juliette Lewis in the Posey role), and loses her bandmates in a bid for solo stardom. But the film loses the catchy soundtrack, the candy-colored production design, and the satire on a culture geared toward turning kids into consumerist zombies. Few critics gave Josie enough credit for cleverly subverting the teen-pop musical, but Jem preys so rapaciously on its target demographic that it holds the virtues of the earlier film in sharp relief. Jem and the Holograms is Mac and Me to Josie and the Pussycats’ E.T.”
Scott Tobias on Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes, in Scott’s at-long-last, first positive review for Variety (!):
“The sins of the past force a painful reckoning in the present in “Magallanes,” a quietly gripping Peruvian thriller about old political wounds and the elusive quest for redemption. Repping an assured bow from Salvador del Solar, a veteran actor stepping behind the camera for the first time, the film follows a cabbie’s attempt to right a past injustice through desperate criminal acts, but his conscience isn’t so easily unburdened. Adapting Alonso Cueto’s novel “La pasajera,” del Solar turns the screws on the audience expertly, but the thriller elements never distract from the moral crisis of a man — and a country — whose decades-old mistakes cling to him like a tattoo. This Peru-Argentina-Colombia-Spain co-production has built-in appeal to Latin territories and festival showcases, but its accessibility and depth suggests an even broader audience.
As with many solid actor-turned-directors, del Solar’s sensitivity to the performances pays the strongest dividends, starting with Damien Alcazar as Magallanes, an aging Lima cab driver whose history as a military aide still aches like a phantom limb…”
Noel Murray on the recent mini-wave of “inescapable horror” movies for AV Club:
“There’s an old saying that one is an example, two is a coincidence, and three is a trend. That’s especially true when it comes to horror, where either because of synchronicity or cold commercial calculation, trends bubble up seemingly overnight, and then dominate the genre for years. One slasher film is an anomaly. Two? Well, sometimes minds—great or otherwise—think alike. But if there’s three? Brace for the glut.
It’s hard to say whether we’re on the verge of a new wave in horror right now, but on the one-two-three trend-scale, it at least qualifies as a coincidence that the two best-reviewed thrillers of the past two years—The Babadook and It Follows—are both relentlessly creepy films about a supernatural evil that can’t be stopped. Are we one movie away from the tipping-point? And if so, what does this say about our collective apocalyptic anxiety in the mid-2010s?”
Noel Murray on Larry Fessenden and the advantages of seeing a director’s work collected and in context for AV Club:
“Digital media has its advantages—portability and durability chief among them—but there’s still no substitute for a good, extras-packed DVD or Blu-ray box set when it comes to putting important work into a larger context. The Scream! Factory/IFC Midnight/Glass Eye Pix co-production The Larry Fessenden Collection contains nice-looking transfers of four feature films by the New York art-horror impresario: 1991’s anti-vivisectionist Frankenstein riff No Telling; 1995’s vampire/addiction drama Habit; 2001’s man-vs.-nature monster movie Wendigo; and 2006’s global-warming eco-thriller The Last Winter. But just as important are the collection’s commentary tracks, interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and samples of Fessenden short films and documentaries dating back to the late 1970s. There’s no easy way for a download or streaming video—or even a repertory retrospective—to replicate the archival quality of The Larry Fessenden Collection. It’s the ephemera gathered in this set that makes such a strong case for a filmmaker who’s often overlooked.
…Because Fessenden has only made five features in the past 25 years (the fifth being 2013’s disappointing Beneath), it’s been hard at times to pinpoint exactly what makes him special. The box set helps, because in addition to extensive comments from the man himself, The Larry Fessenden Collection covers a lot of what he’s been doing between the bigger films: making shorts and music videos, serving as a producer for his friends’ horror and art-cinema fare, and working as a character actor. All those other pieces come together here into collage-like picture of Fessenden, showing him as an industrious DIY type, biding his time and staying on the margins so that he can create work of uncompromised personal vision.”
